On September 18, 2001, the Mexican environment minister announced that his experts had done tests in 22 farming communities and found contaminated corn in 13 of them, with a level of contamination between 3 and 10 per cent. A few months later Ignacio Chapela and David Quist became a focus of attention, probably because of the reputation of Nature, which published their article in late November. When they’d submitted the article to the journal eight months earlier, the two scientists had received compliments on the quality of their study, and the article was sent to four reviewers, who approved it. But as a local paper, the East Bay Express, pointed out in May 2002: ”No one could have predicted the magnitude of the controversy to come.” The result was a veritable media lynching, largely organised from St Louis.